Good Birth by Patrick Earl - June 20-28, 2026

The 2026 Playwrights Initiative World Premiere is Good Birth by Patrick Earl.  This new work tells the story of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. This facility, right across the James River from Lynchburg, VA, was later called the The Central Virginia Training Center before its closure in 2019. It became the center of the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that upheld a physician’s right to forcibly sterilize a patient. Good Birth is a fictional tale of a young girl asked too soon to fight for her right to bear a child and suffer society’s misguided view of intelligence; all while facing down the brute force of the American Eugenics Movement in the early 1900s.